A software release life cycle of a software application includes multiple stages from a series of development releases that occur nightly, through the alpha release, the beta release, the release to manufacturing, the release to production, various testing, verifications, etc. and thus requires a joint effort involving multiple teams such as the development team, the quality team, various test teams, the database team, the marketing team, the finance team, the documentation team, etc.
A software release life cycle thus faces several challenges and proceeds through multiple stages before the software application is ready for release to its intended users and is ready for release to manufacturing. For example, different teams may use different tools or systems in different environments in an independent manner. In addition, various teams may require different pieces of information or code to accomplish their respective mission objectives. In reality, each team or developer may be responsible for a task upon which one or more other teams or developers depend. For example, a developer may continue to develop and revise a code module (e.g., a segment of the entire software application) multiple times during a release cycle; and those who rely on this code module would need to wait until this code module is ready to proceed to the next phase in a release cycle. As another example, different test teams may run different tests to ensure that the software application meets their respective goals or standards; and each engineer in the development team may work on individual pieces of code that are to be integrated together to form the entire software application and thus impact one another.
Conventional software release and deployment models rely on a variety of software tools that provide release information (e.g., information pertaining to code development, various testing, etc.), revision tracking, status, various reports and messages, which software components are involved or affected by a particular release, which artifacts are needed or affected by a specific release, which features are newly introduced or revised, whether a revised feature is still compatible with the remaining portion of the software application, approval status, etc. These pieces of information may be closely related to each other during the development of a software release. Conventional approaches often have each member on a team store pertinent information pertaining to the part of the software application that the member is responsible for in a variety of different sources and formats. Different teams may even store such pertinent information at different locations or structures. For example, the development team may have its information stored on a development database; a test team may store its test suites and test results on a test database; etc. As a result, a developer often has to identify the right sources to access desired information (e.g., has a code module needed by the developer been approved?). Also, much of the information requires manual inputs and may thus fall short due to human errors that may cause profound, negative impacts on software deployment.
A conventional software release therefore requires extensive of manual and tedious efforts in creating, maintaining, bookkeeping, communicating, and coordinating various intermediate products among these various teams and is thus error prone and requires a substantial amount time to complete each stage during the software release life cycle. In fact, the mere identification of and access to individual artifacts of the correct versions may require repeated efforts and thus a waste of human as well as computational resources.
When a software application undergoes a revision (e.g., a change in the artifacts, in the code, etc.), conventional software release management systems rely on human efforts to identify the affected portions of the software and to communicate the change to the corresponding responsible developer. This is due to, for example, the large number of disconnections between various client systems that are used by various teams to release a software application. Such disconnections often require some manual efforts (e.g., manual identification of affected portions of a software application and corresponding responsible parties) that are known to be error prone and inefficient. Moreover, some conventional approaches attempt to address these problems, yet these approaches often rely on the purported progress provided by various team members and often stored in an unstructured storage space (e.g., in an unstructured internal wiki) and are thus lagging at best, if not incomplete or even incorrect. Moreover, the accuracy of such unstructured storage of information depends closely upon the completeness of the progress reports (or other information) provided by the developers.
For example, a developer may have developed a code module without necessarily knowing that a component referenced in the code module has already been revised to cause incompatibility with the code module. Even if the developer is aware of such a revision of the component so the developer can revise the code module to cope with the revised component, the developer often does not know when the developer may proceed to revise the code module to cope with the revision of the component. The developer thus needs notification from others or proactive and perhaps consistent checking the status of the component while the code module that needs to be revised to accommodate the revised component occupies unnecessary space on storage and perhaps blocks subsequent tasks that depend on the code module.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer product for an integrated platform for continuous deployment of software application delivery models to address at least the aforementioned challenges. There is also a need for a method, system, and computer product for automating the release and deployment of a software application delivery model at least by tracking and moving the software application along the pipeline for the continuous release and deployment of the software application delivery model.